


Weighed, Measured, and Found Wanting

by nsalmon



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 15:39:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1231912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nsalmon/pseuds/nsalmon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock could see that when left to her own devices, Irene Adler was a crazed woman, for he recognized the symptoms that he himself showed. She craved the challenge, the enigmatic air of anonymity that surrounded her more influential clients, and she relished her ability to control, with a single flick of her riding crop, the most powerful people in all of Britain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weighed, Measured, and Found Wanting

_Sex doesn’t alarm me._

_How would you know?_

Sherlock sat alone in the flat, upside down on the couch. He’d been too internally focused to expend energy on steepling his hands—when he’d come downstairs he’d simply collapsed on the couch, arms flopping about, seemingly useless.

_I could cut myself slapping those cheeks—would you like me to try?_

_I want you to remember me like this—the woman who beat Sherlock Holmes._

His mind was still reeling from yesterday’s events, and everything he was thinking was slightly slurred, as though the drug The Woman had injected into his system was still sloshing around in his skull cavity. This particular sensation was making it terribly hard to force his thoughts go in the direction he wanted them to, and anyway, Sherlock couldn’t muster up the wherewithal to direct his thoughts to the case at hand.

She was obviously a lesbian, that much was certain. Her complete and utter lack of self-consciousness standing completely naked in an enclosed space in front of two men suggested that she wasn’t personally invested in the reactions of the two men to her body (i.e., she wasn’t interested in whether they were interested in her or not). Her blatant attempt to try and pettily seduce him by complimenting his most aesthetically pleasing feature—his cheekbones—showed Sherlock that she’d had ample experience telling men what they wanted to hear, complimenting a feature they already were proud of to inflate their egos even more. If she’d been legitimately trying to express an interest in him, she would have tried harder than that to get his attention. Her interest, however, had certainly been piqued when he spoke of the case in front of her…admittedly, he’d been trying to impress her, see if she had any heterosexual leanings, for indeed, she was quite aesthetically pleasing, and he wanted to figure her out, find all of her weaknesses and exploit them. He’d gotten the desired result. When he led her to the solution (the boomerang), she’d looked at him with a slightly flushed face and eyes with very, very dilated pupils. Her chest heaved slightly and she looked, surprisingly, unused to such bodily reactions outside of the recreational sex in which she participated so often. She was used to being in control, and in solving the case of the hiker and the boomerang, Sherlock had taken the reins, and she’d been left slightly bewildered.

Sherlock had wondered, as they’d flirted around the issue of her mobile phone, if they were alike in composition, both clinical and calculating, both bold and, perhaps, driven to the point of single-mindedness in striving towards an end. Her interest in him was surely purely clinical, that of a lab scientist examining a subject under a microscope. Here was a new specimen—a man unlike one she’d ever met before, with the exception of maybe Mycroft (and Sherlock was _certainly_ much more interesting than Mycroft), and he had shown no overtly visible signs of arousal at the sight of her, naked. This was an advantage he was proud of. He presented a challenge to her, then, and if she was anything like him, she’d want to conquer him, dissect him, find out what made him tick, and then use it to beat him at...whatever kind of game they were playing.

After all, that’s how Sherlock thought of her, and wouldn’t such a woman, skilled in the art of seduction, think the same way? After all, she had approached him the way that he approached a new case—with the kind of fervent excitement that was not easily contained in front of other people; Sherlock could see that when left to her own devices, Irene Adler was a crazed woman, for he recognized the symptoms that he himself showed. She _craved_ the challenge, the enigmatic air of anonymity that surrounded her more influential clients, and she relished her ability to control, with a single flick of her riding crop, the most powerful people in all of Britain. And he lived for the chase, the mystery that enveloped a case; he loved being able to channel all of his energy into solving a murder, for he loved letting his mind free to roam and run rampant over evidence, picking up subtle clues and leaving Scotland Yard in the dust. It wasn’t showing off—it was more of a self-recognition that he wasn’t meant to be confined to the mundanity of regular London life—and neither was The Woman, so she’d made up her own rules. She had a focused drive unparalleled to any except maybe Sherlock himself, and it seemed that her overarching goal was to control the world. Or something along those lines.

And when he’d been lying on Irene’s bedroom’s floor after having her phone wrested from his hands, she’d said that she’d already beaten ‘The Great Sherlock Holmes,’ but he could see in her eyes that she knew she was a long way from a victory. He knew, too, that he would win in the end, and the only thing that had prevented him from smiling after he realized that was the fact that whatever drug she’d injected into him had strangely altered his ability to control his muscles.

Sherlock knew one thing for sure--he would, like Irene had suggested on her oh-so-carefully-crafted website, know when he was beaten. And he was certain he was far, far from it.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the movie A Knight's Tale (with Heath Ledger, my bby). This might turn into a chapter thing, but might not, so we'll just have to see where it goes.


End file.
